Tuesday, 27 August 2013

Mind Mapping, brainstorming, spray diagrams... whatever name
you use, the technique of displaying a large amount of interconnected
information on an easily understandable diagram, is one to get a grips with.

The basic idea of Mind Maps is to write up and at the same
time connect ideas, concepts and information. In doing so the information is
made accessible and usable. For example, think of a car, now mentally break the
car down into its main components, now think what individual pieces make those
main components, repeat for the whole car. How would you present that
information? A long list, bullet points? That’s a long set of lists and
indented bullet points!

Take something we do every day in testing, decompose
functionality of an application. We have the application itself, then its major
functional areas, there may be sub-functions too and key behaviour that depends
on the system state.

For example we have Website > Navigation, form, but
also images and text, some of which is / is not visible/active when a user is
logged in - it’s already hard to list just a few items, now try and relate test
conditions;

·Application

oForm

§Valid /
Invalid Data

·When logged in or logged out

§Error
trapping

·Pre and post submit

oNavigation

§Main items

·Change on mouseover, onclick, postclick

§Subitems

·As per main items, but different colour

It already looks messy and hard to follow, you could number
them and come up with a host of other ideas. It also doesn't lend itself to
expansion and readability.

Mind Maps offer a simple way around this and done right can
replace a surprising amount of documentation. Test Scripts or Cases might be
expressed as a Mind Map, Exploratory test conditions and Test Diary might be
combined on a Mind Map.

In the short video I show a few tools for Mind Mapping, all
free and available for Windows or Mac.

Why not have a look and see how you can start using Mind
Maps in your testing?